Junior Boys on the hunger, exhaustion and misogyny of looking for love

When Jeremy Greenspan sat back to process the lyrics he’d written for the latest Junior Boys record, Big Black Coat (City Slang/Geej), he noticed a pattern: virtually every song was about men who resented women who refused to love them.

Sitting in the Brain, the cozy Hamilton bar he co-owns, Greenspan says he was inspired to write them by the type of people who spend their nights drinking with strangers.

“It’s mainly an assemblage of the kinds of guys you meet in bars who have an aura of loneliness,” he says, afternoon sunlight flickering into the Brain’s back room. “Guys who are confused about their own emotional states. There’s a mild thread of misogyny in so far as they’re super-confused and annoyed by women who don’t reciprocate what they feel. Song after song is about that.”

Before our discussion, Big Black Coat’s lyrics – ripe with basic instincts – had sounded slyly romantic to me. On some level they are, but they’re also very raw.

Normally Greenspan, along with Junior Boys counterpart Matt Didemus, writes the duo’s sophisticated electronic-based pop music first and then plays around with vocal melodies and lyrics gibberish as placeholders on demos before eventually refining the lyrics. This time he barely expanded on his rudimentary, impulsive utterances, and most of Big Black Coat features his demo vocals as they were recorded with lousy microphones.

“I wanted the lyrics to be immediate,” he explains. “I didn’t want them to seem over-thought. That’s why the album is filled with the word ‘baby.’ It just came out of me really fast. I wanted to be speaking in the voice of a real human being and not be poetic.”

In a sense, Greenspan’s lyrics seem to reflect the deep hunger and alienating exhaustion of looking for love in a working-class world. Bearing witness to such awkward but common interactions among singles in his hometown bar gave him pause.

“I realized there was a concept to the record in that it was about Hamilton,” he explains. “About living and working in the downtown core of a post-industrial, rust belt city that is -nowheresville.”